CNET News Video

A viral video star talks about learning to hear

A 29-year-old Texas woman recently became an Internet star after her husband posted video of her hearing her own voice for the first time. CNET's Kara Tsuboi sat down with Sarah Churman to hear more about the new, high-tech hearing implant.

1:37 / October 24, 2011

Transcript

-This is the YouTube video that instantly made Sarah Churman a star.
-So, now technically, you delight on.
Can you tell?
-I just start crying because I could hear myself and then I was laughing because here I am in this like awesome moment and I'm crying.
It was just the snowball of emotion.
-Sarah has been deaf since birth, but that all changed in August when she received at Envoy Medical's a Esteem, a fully implantable hearing device.
There's never been a moment where
I didn't always hope that someday I could get my hearing back where there would be some sort technology or surgery, always desire to have that because I've always realized what all that means [unk].
-The Esteem is unlike the traditional hearing aid or cochlear implant.
It capitalizes on the body's own anatomy and turns the eardrum into a sensor.
-We drive the sound into the cochlea.
Whereas the hearing aid is sets in the ear canal and the sound has to travel through the ear, then through the eardrum on into the ear and there's a lot of opportunity for distortion
and loss of quality.
-Sarah and her husband, Sloan, say, the Esteem implant has had a profound effect on their family of 4.
-When I walk in the kitchen, she is crying.
She is like, has these girls always sounded like this?
Because she has never the little voices they way they are.
-Now, the Churman's are on the media circuit to spread the word and to try to get insurance companies to pay for the $60,000 devices.
-It's given me life that I haven't had and that is music to her ears.
In San Jose, I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET.com for CBS news.

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